Every year millions of people, businesses, and organizations around the world use electronic financial management systems, such as electronic accounting systems, to help manage their finances. Electronic accounting systems use accounts for categorization of business transactions. Such electronic accounting systems gather data related to financial transactions of the users. The users can then sort the financial transactions into the various accounts in order to track their expenditures and revenues by category. The users can monitor many or all of their financial transactions and other financial matters from a single electronic accounting system and sort them into the various financial accounts. Such an electronic accounting system can help users to save time by eliminating the need to check with several different financial institutions in order to manage their finances. However, traditional financial management systems are unable to optimize the financial management services provided to their users because the traditional financial management systems are not able to adequately assist users in sorting their financial transactions into their various accounts.
For instance, some traditional financial management systems enable users to generate and name the various accounts into which the users will sort their financial transactions. Traditional financial management systems may attempt to recommend that the user sort the financial transaction into a particular account based on the name of the account. However, the names of the accounts chosen by users are often not adequate, by themselves, to enable a traditional financial management system to discern the true nature of the accounts. Accordingly, traditional financial management systems may suggest unrelated accounts or may not be able to make any suggestion at all. In the case that the traditional financial management system does not recommend any account to the user, the user is often forced to scroll through an entire chart of accounts each time the user seeks to sort a financial transaction into an account. This can be tedious and time consuming. In the case that the traditional financial management system makes a faulty account recommendation, this can distract the user and force the user into extra work in attempting to find the right account into which to sort the financial transaction. These inconveniences are magnified when the user uses a mobile device to sort financial transactions.
The inability of traditional financial systems to adequately understand the nature of user-created accounts results in under-utilization of the potential of electronic financial management systems. For example, traditional financial management systems cannot adequately automate the process of sorting electronic financial transactions of the users. This results in wasted time and resources for both the users and the financial management systems. Furthermore, users may decide not to use the financial management system due to the inconvenience of the manual sorting process, or, worse yet, users may abandon the traditional financial management system because the traditional financial management system often erroneously sorts financial transactions into user accounts. The unrealized potential extends beyond merely assisting with the sorting process. A financial management system that understands the nature of the users' financial accounting and business practices can offer better data management services to the users and to third-parties.
What is needed is a method and system that solves the long standing technical problem of electronic financial management systems that are not able to accurately and efficiently assist users in sorting their financial transactions into the proper accounts.